Sunday, January 11, 2015

The Eternal Vastness of God

Look up to
the sky. Now look beyond it, 250 miles above the earth. Young people are only
the third generation in human history to be able to do this – to look up to the
sky and really KNOW that beyond the blueness is the blackness and vastness of
space.

We are the
first human beings to be able to close our eyes and realistically imagine what
it is like to be in orbit around the Earth, and to be able to turn around and
look DOWN upon this globe on which all of us live. And not only us, but we know
that this is the planet on which all people throughout history were born, have
lived and have died.

And they have seen behind it a vast number of other suns. And we now know that our own sun is only ONE among hundreds of billions of suns in our own Milky Way Galaxy, and beyond the Milky Way lies a vastly larger universe of countless billions of suns.

When we look up, then, we learn that we are not alone; that when we stand together on this tiny rock, we know that we are truly together. And while some believe that our smallness in space should make us smaller and more alone, instead, it makes us greater and ennobles our existence.

We can now gather together and know, far more than other previous generations, what “Eternal” truly means, and the vastness which encompasses such a word.

Our gatherings, our Church, belongs to God, the Eternal Creator of all that exists, and we know this Creator has not only created the stars and the galaxies, but each and every soul of every human being that has ever lived, including our own.

Church, then, is not merely a place to give lip-service to a small deity – a shrunken and tiny god who grants wishes, fulfills our desires of the moment, our yearning for a bigger pile of material goods – because we know that our bodies are a speck of dust even on this planet, and last a very short time. In the grand scheme of the universe, such pursuits are unworthy to ask of an eternal Creator who created all of this, and unworthy of our lives, which are meant to be Righteous and Noble.

No, Church
must now have greater meaning. It must serve a BIGGER purpose, because we now
know that God is vastly larger than previous generations could ever have
imagined. Church for THIS generation, for this time, must be a holy temple where we encounter the Divine in utter and complete humility. We
encounter God – the God of Jesus, Who is named Yahweh – as the Unseen and
Eternal Creator of every Star in the Universe, even the hundreds of billions we
cannot and will likely never see with our eyes or detect with our telescopes.

We must
approach this Eternal God with reverence, not merely emotionalism; with
dignity, not merely unthinking casualness; with selflessness, rather than
selfishness.

Church
must be where we reverently encounter the divine, holy Spirit of God. It is where we become
spiritually fulfilled, and spiritually completed, so we may go forth to give of
ourselves completely to those sharing this Planet with us, serving them with
humility and the knowledge that God is pleased by these, our Works of
Righteousness and service to others.